The Oxford Book of American Essays is an anthology of essays and articles by prominent and significant American writers and essayists. Content: The Ephemera: an Emblem of Human Life (Benjamin Franklin) The Whistle (Benjamin Franklin) Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout (Benjamin Franklin) Consolation for the Old Bachelor (Francis Hopkinson) John Bull (Washington Irving) The Mutability of Literature (Washington Irving) Kean's Acting (Richard Henry Dana) Gifts (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Uses of Great Men (Ralph Waldo Emerson) Buds and Bird-voices (Nathaniel Hawthorne) The Philosophy of Composition (Edgar Allan Poe) Bread and the Newspaper (Oliver Wendell Holmes) Walking (Henry David Thoreau) On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners (James Russell Lowell) Preface To "Leaves of Grass" (Walt Whitman) Americanism in Literature (Thomas Wentworth Higginson) Thackeray in America (George William Curtis) Our March To Washington (Theodore Winthrop) Calvin (A Study of Character) (Charles Dudley Warner) Five American Contributions To Civilization (Charles William Eliot) I Talk of Dreams (William Dean Howells) An Idyl of the Honey-bee (John Burroughs) Cut-off Copples's (Clarence King) The Théâtre Français (Henry James) Theocritus on Cape Cod (Hamilton Wright Mabie) Colonialism in the United States (Henry Cabot Lodge) New York After Paris (William Crary Brownell) The Tyranny of Things (Edward Sandford Martin) Free Trade Vs. Protection in Literature (Samuel McChord Crothers) Dante and the Bowery (Theodore Roosevelt) The Revolt of the Unfit (Nicholas Murray Butler) On Translating the Odes of Horace (William Peterfield Trent)

Brander Matthews (1852-1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study by academics.